In his philosophical novel, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1883-85), famously wrote, 'God is dead,' signifying that God is no longer credible as an absolute moral compass. Over a century later, Paikeday (1985), proclaimed that "The native speaker is dead!" in his book title, implying that the native speaker as the arbiter of what is…

This study investigates the role of emotional linguistic input in learning novel words with abstract and concrete denotations. It is widely accepted that concrete words are processed more easily than abstract ones. Several theories of vocabulary acquisition additionally propose a critical role of sensorimotor and emotional information during novel…

Background: In countries with German as an official language, children with German as a second language perform overall worse in school than their German native speaking peers. This particularly affects written language skills, which require advanced language knowledge. The reasons are manifold, but one is prominent, namely poor vocabulary…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

Cognitive factors have been recognised as important in the interpreting process, but whether they could serve as valid components of interpreting aptitude still awaits further investigation. This study explores the predictive value of cognitive fluency in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance of trainee interpreters. Cognitive fluency…

For the purpose of achieving a successful communication, issues such as the appropriateness of speech acts and face saving become essential. Therefore, it is very important to achieve a high level of pragmatic competence in speech acts. Bearing this in mind, this study was conducted to investigate the preferred refusal strategies Kurdish and…

Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming…

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ("Interface Hypothesis", Sorace and Filiaci in "Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian." "Second Lang…

The present paper attempts to study the realization of refusal responses to invitations and requests among Yemen EFL learners in equal, higher and lower social status. It also aims to find out the pragmatic failure resulted from negative pragmatic transfer. In order to do so, refusals of 40 Yemeni EFL (20 high and 20 low proficient) learners were…

Recent research has demonstrated that L2 learners and heritage speakers might have two different profiles in terms of their syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical-semantic knowledge of a target language (Montrul, 2004, 2006, 2010; Montrul, Foote, & Perpinan, 2008). However, the most influential of the major studies have been limited to…

This study aims to investigate how Turkish Teacher Trainees of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) interpret implied meanings, which is an integral but lesser-studied component of pragmatic competence. The conduct of the study began with the development of an online multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) through two piloting phases.…

This article describes the design and application of a computer-based system for simultaneously teaching Korean, English and Japanese languages in a classroom setting using knowledge visualization techniques to show the relationships between vocabularies, grammars and meanings. The system consists of a knowledge database of Korean, English, and…

The main objective of this study was to investigate the refusal speech act among Omani EFL college students. It examined how they refused in various situations and whether their responses were appropriate in terms of culture and accurate in terms of language. Forty-one English as foreign language (EFL) learners completed a Discourse Completion…